Pyotr Petrovich Konchalovsky

Pyotr Petrovich Konchalovsky (born Feb. 9 [Feb. 21, New Style], 1876, Slov’yansk, Ukraine, Russian Empire [now Slov’yansk, Ukr.]—died Feb. 2, 1956, Moscow, Russia, U.S.S.R.) was a Russian painter and graphic artist who was representative of the Moscow School. Although he was much influenced by the work of Paul Cézanne in the early 20th century, he turned away from this style in the 1930s and embraced Socialist Realism, becoming a classic exemplar of Soviet painting and forfeiting any further claim to innovation in his art.

Konchalovsky received an art education in a drawing school in Kharkov, Ukr., at the Stroganov Central Industrial Art School in Moscow, and at the Academy of Arts in St. Petersburg (until 1905). For a short period he also attended the School of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture in Moscow, where the painter Konstantin Korovin taught. As a result of his contact with Korovin, Konchalovsky acquired the expertise of the Moscow School with its predisposition to corporeality and its unbridled approach to colour. Konchalovsky was also influenced by a short period of study at the Académie Julian in Paris (1897–98), which aroused his interest in French painting. In this way he melded two rich traditions of painting that became a key feature of his art.

In 1909, together with Aristarkh Lentulov and Ilya Mashkov, Konchalovsky cofounded the avant-garde group the Jack of Diamonds. After a trip to Spain in 1910 with Vasily Surikov, a well-known artist and member of the Peredvizhniki (“the Wanderers”)—Konchalovsky was to marry Surikov’s daughter—Konchalovsky for a time made art that was influenced by Spanish themes, particularly landscapes and bullfighting scenes. Later he was influenced by Paul Gauguin. Yet, though others made an impact on his style, Konchalovsky idolized Cézanne most of all and can be considered the founder of Russian Cézannism.

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Throughout the 1910s, Konchalovsky’s Cézannism merged with primitivism, then with Cubism, and in the 1920s with an interest in Venetian painting. It was during these years that he painted his best works—Siena: Piazza dei Signori (1912), Agava (1916), and Self-Portrait with Wife (1923). In his later work Konchalovsky was more successful in still lifes and landscapes, as these did not manifest the excessive social pathos typical of Socialist Realism. One exception to the banality of much of his later work is a superb portrait of the theatre director Vsevolod Meyerhold (1938), which he painted a few months before Meyerhold’s arrest.